Two Books on Eugene O’Neill

This week in the magazine, Hilton Als reviews the current Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” a play in which O’Neill’s recurring theme of unattainable love takes the form of a son pining for his dead mother. We asked Als to share his favorite books on the playwright.

Eugene O’Neill left us over fifty plays when he died in a hotel room in Boston in 1953, but he left us a monumental life, too, one that scholars and biographers mine with the kind of enthusiasm and dread O’Neill employed to write his last, great plays. Of the biographies, two stand out: Arthur and Barbarba Gelb’s undisputed masterpiece, “O’Neill,” and my personal favorite, Louis Sheaffer’s two-volume work, “O’Neill: Son and Playwright.” The Gelbs were given access to O’Neill’s life and work by his widow, and the book is too cautious because of it; Sheaffer’s has a greater emotional and narrative thrust, which is why I was greatly drawn to it as a teen-ager, and read it in tandem with O’Neill’s imaginatively rich, sad, and heartbreaking plays.

(Photograph of Eugene O’Neill on Cape Cod with his wife and daughter, 1922.)

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